The Original LOLCats

Think our fascination with quirky pictures of cats began with the Internet? In their new book, “The Photographed Cat: Picturing Human-Feline Ties, 1890-1940” (Syracuse University Press), authors Arnold Arluke and Lauren Rolfe show how we’ve been embarrassing our furry friends since the birth of photography. Here, Tiger, the mascot of a VFW post in Long Beach, Calif., poses after World War I.

In the suffragette campaigns in England, women would go on hunger strikes in prison for the right to vote. The Prisoner’s Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act of 1913 let authorities release prisoners, then re-arrest them when they got better — it became known as the “Cat-and-Mouse Act.” Advocates started to use cats as a symbol in posters like this.

When he began searching for old cat pictures, author Arnold Arluke said he expected to find more shots of barn cats and other outdoor wanderers. Instead there were a lot of domestic scenes, like this one with a grandmother and grandson. “Were it not for the period dress and furniture styles, they look like many of the pictures we have of our cats on our cell phones,” he says. “While many more people today than a century ago have cats as pets and regard their cats as members of the family, we certainly weren’t the first to have such a relationship.”

“The happy family — 11 cats, find them” is inscribed on the back of this shot circa 1913.

There will always be shop cats — like this one from Leonardsville, NY, “the kitty that lives in the store.”

Here kitty, kitty, kitty. One of the challenge of collecting old cat photos is that many of the shots are blurry — the cats wouldn’t sit still long enough for the old technology. Amazingly this cat being teased by a couple came out sharp.

Portraits, like this one of a boy and his cat, became popular in the early part of last century. One cat photographer was Charles Bullard of Peterboro, N.H. Passing by some cats in a window, Bullard had a “hunch” that the public would love photographs of cats, even though his friends regarded this impulse to be “crazy.” Soon Bullard focused almost entirely on making cat portraits, a fact that did not escape the humor of one journalist, who noted: “It is a very common experience to hear stories of men who have ‘gone to the dogs,’ but one never hears of men who have ‘gone to the cats,’ ” Arnold Arluke writes.

Cats — they make good pillows. A shot from Lomdille, Minn. of a girl and her rather fat kitty.

Arnold Arluke says he can’t pick a favorite, “but if I had to choose it might be the older man standing with a cat on his shoulder. . . . While photographs often depicted women holding cats as though they were babies or holding cats’ faces up to and touching their own for the photographer, such poses were almost never made of adult men. The men appear to need some distance from the cat to show that they were not nurturing the cat or displaying what would have been seen as feminine behaviors.”

Postcards with cats also were popular, including this “sex kitten.”

Another postcard, this one for a sweetheart — romantic love over a cat.

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Think our fascination with quirky pictures of cats began with the Internet? In their new book, “The Photographed Cat,” authors Arnold Arluke and Lauren Rolfe show how we’ve been embarrassing our furry friends since the birth of photography.

Arluke, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Northeastern University who specializes in animal-human interaction, was expecting to find mostly pictures of working cats — barn mousers and the like — from the turn of last century. Instead, he found a surprising number of intimate portraits.

“Were it not for the period dress and furniture styles, they look like many of the pictures we have of our cats on our cellphones,” Arluke says. “While many more people today than a century ago have cats as pets and regard their cats as members of the family, we certainly weren’t the first to have such a relationship.”

In fact, some portrait photographers ended up specializing in pet pictures, and cats appeared on many of the mass-produced postcards of the day.

Cats even were used to make a political point. When women in prison went on hunger strikes for the right to vote, England passed a law that allowed for them to be released — then re-arrested as soon as they got better. The “cat and mouse law” led to the suffragettes adopting the cat as one of their symbols, as shown at right.

While the book puts together an impressive collection of Gilded Age-era cats, there were limitations, he notes.

“There were far fewer cat photographs, compared to dog photographs,” Arluke says. Photographs took longer to take back then, and the cats often ended up blurry.

Because just as our love of cats hasn’t changed, neither has their unwillingness to cooperate.